No Debate

In 2007, Ian Buruma profiledTariq Ramadan, the high-profile European Muslim professor who’d been denied an entry visa to the United States the prior year, in The New York Times Magazine. Though some see Ramadan as a moderate voice in an increasingly radicalized European Islamic community, others see him as dangerous. Buruma offered a noncommittal assessment, and that seeming insouciance infuriated the writer Paul Berman, who has been examining the liberal response to terrorism and the growth of political Islam for the past decade. In his new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, he takes Buruma and other writers to task for insufficiently challenging Ramadan and, by failing to do so, becoming apologists for Muslim fundamentalists. (The Flight of the Intellectuals is reviewed in Tablet Magazine today by Christopher Hitchens.)

Berman spoke to Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry about Ramadan’s family ties (his grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood), about the link between Islamism and fascism, and about whether the camps for and against Ramadan parallel the camps that either embrace Israel, flaws notwithstanding, or take every opportunity to criticize it.

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Vox Tablet is Tablet Magazine's weekly podcast, hosted by Sara Ivry and produced by Julie Subrin. You can listen to individual episodes here or subscribe on iTunes.

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Wow. Ms Ivry was outstanding and Berman delivered an excellent analysis. But, better to focus on what Ramadan has said and done rather than all his families’ associations. What a great resource Tablet is.

Dani Levisays:

May 25, 2010 - 3:55 am

Very timely piece. All should google and read Hamas’s charter.

Leahsays:

May 26, 2010 - 4:10 pm

An excellent and balanced interview. Berman is a voice of honesty and reason.

Raymond in DCsays:

June 17, 2010 - 3:23 pm

A fine interview, but I have to challenge Berman’s suggestion that the idea of Israel being inherently “evil” has little basis in Islam, that its origins are primarily European. That’s simply wrong. There’s a long history of Jew hatred going back to the very beginnings of Islam, and the references run through the Quran itself. Mohammed himself led the genocide against the Jews of Arabia, ultimately banishing, despoiling or enslaving them all. The Jews were, as “people of the book”, tolerated but deemed the “killers of prophets”, the children of Satan, to be held in submission and humiliated until the End of Days when they would all be destroyed. Maimonides himself has some choice words about how the Muslims have oppressed the Jewish people.

It is true of course that the Islamic world has absorbed ideas from the anti-Semitic West – the blood libel, for example, entered that world in the 19th century, while the Protocols introduced the idea of the world-wide Jewish conspiracy. But those ideas simply took root in fertile ground.

How should a fool run blindly to oppose a Muslim fanatic. By being anti-fanatic people express negation franaticism, like the Jewish people who after attending demonstrations lie comfortably having removed their shoes and having pronounced themselves heroes. The Jewish people were hosted by the Islamic world for two thousand years and we’ve made their lives miserable ever since they became guests in our nation. The only praise these joint tenants will ever find is when they establish a democracy that counts the votes of each and every qualified citizen in the shared goveremental and territorial entity Isareli Palestine.

Stewartsays:

June 21, 2010 - 1:52 pm

Just stumped upon this site and was rather excited — until I realized it’s merely another stale conservative voice for Jews. bye

elisays:

July 4, 2010 - 7:55 pm

Stewart, good riddance – no matter the varied political positions, Jews do not need someone who hates Jews; in fact those with this type of prejudice are not needed elsewhere either.

Recently, some Zionist media outlets and blogs have started to resurrect Tariq Ramadan as an “expert on women issues” in Islam. I think Tariq is being given a second chance to prove that is really interested to be given his title of a Muslim ‘Martin Luther’ – as long as he avoid to make ‘political incorrect’ staement as the famous Egyptian feminist activist, Dr. Nawal Saadawi, did when she told her fellow feminist activists attending the Montreal Conference on Women and Power: “The most restrictive elements toward women can be found first in Judaism in the Old Testament then in Christianity and then in the Qur’an. All religions are patriarchal because they stem from patriarchal societies. And veiling of women is nota specifically Islamic practice but an ancient cultural heritage with analogies in sister religions.” For this truth, Dr. Nawal met shouts from Jewish and Christian activists calling her “anti-Semite” and a “Jew-hater”.

The Washington Post Company’s ownership is not Jewish. It is publicly-owned.

But the comparison of Ramadan to Martin Luther is apt; Martin Luther is one of history’s most famous haters of Jews: “First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom… Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed.”

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